The ABCs of Wammy's House
by waffles301
Summary: Wammy's House has its own ghosts. The people that passed through the walls never really left. You can still see their marks made on the institution. I'm here to tell their stories. I'm a different kind of ghost. A story about the Wammy Kids, from A-Z.
1. Ghosts

I used to think of Wammy's House as its own island, isolated from world, protected and secure from whatever goes on outside our walls. The world seemed kind of scary back then, full of ghosts and monsters and whatever else parents told children about to keep then in bed at night. Of course, none of us here have parents anymore.

Still, Wammy's House was supposed to be a place of security. We kinda lived on our time, because if anything happened on the outside, it didn't affect us. A child's selfishness, maybe, but I never wanted to leave. I didn't want to face the world's monsters and ghosts.

But of course, the house had its own.

For an institution of geniuses, the house was pretty full. Of course, everyone would love to believe they're special, that they are a prodigy at something. I suppose if you look close enough, everyone does have a talent that they're considered a genius at. Me, it was being invisible.

People called me a ghost. Seems like I've been here forever, never changing. I never wanted to leave like the others. Because the others passed through here, walked down these halls, through those doors and out into the big world. They left traces, you know. You can see them in the apple trees outside, the painted windows that scatter the light throughout the house.

Everyone had a story, it seems. Each one of the Wammy kids had a purpose. They became the painters, the dancers, the detectives, sometimes the criminals that make up today's society. And they were very good at what they did.

I'm a ghost, of some sorts, because I watched them all. I was a watcher. I never joined in. I guess my purpose is to tell their stories. The kind you can't read about in books. I can't read, you know. I didn't learn my alphabet.

I knew them all, from A-Z.


	2. A

A was smart. A was a prodigy. The top, the beginning. Just like the beginning of the alphabet. He got the top tests scores, always. But before he was A, the genius, he was A, the boy who loved to climb trees. There used to be a number of apple trees just outside. Sometimes A, B, a few other kids and I would sneak outside and see who could climb the fastest.

A always won. He was the only one who could make it to the very top without falling. I broke my arm once trying to copy him. No one else tried after that. He kinda reigned over us with the air of a king. Not cruel, but superior. Unreachable.

But it wasn't without cost. He spent a lot of time studying and preparing and reading. Often he'd hole himself in the library for days at a time. I used to wonder how he'd eat or sleep with all those books around him, working, working, and working. Every once in a while he'd stop to look around, poke his head outside the door to see what the world was doing. But those 'visits' that he graced us with soon became less and less until he finally retreated from the world.

I never quite understood what he was working for. A common goal that everyone within Wammy's House shared (shouldered) was to replace the legendary detective we had never seen or known. But some took it further. Some saw it as a game. A matter of pride.

A never wanted that. I believe he would have been perfectly contented just to achieve the name, to become the one everyone wanted to be. But it was like chasing a mirage-the closer he got, the further the goal got away.

Like I said, A used to be an excellent climber. Whenever it was decided that the kids of Wammy's House should be rewarded with a treat of some kind, they sent A out to scurry up the trees and gather the best apples from the very top to be made into a kind of apple crisp. It used to be his very favorite dessert.

When A started to camp out in the library, a few kids used to hang around to watch him work, flipping through multiple pages at a time and writing using both hands. Sometimes they would run and get him things like water or extra pencils. A never asked, but Wammy's House raised and nurtured geniuses. We knew the limits of the human body.

The boy A started to disappear until we never saw him anymore. His roommate, B, hid his worry beneath a façade of indifference. B sometimes studied with A, but they never spoke to each other like they did before. Sometimes I wonder if the constant pressure to be everything caused us to grow up too fast. Soon A didn't speak at all.

This didn't go unnoticed by the adults, but they didn't do anything. They didn't consider what the long hours in the library alone would do to a teenage boy who was only living up to other's expectations. They didn't wonder what was going through his head as he sat at a table with the world's knowledge to learn.

What _was _going through your head, A?

One day he wasn't in the library. Wasn't anywhere in the house. B was the one who discovered the book left untouched, pencils scattered across the floor and the last word left off of quote in a paper he had been writing. I won't ever forget those words, that unfinished proclamation. Perhaps it was note of some sorts-A always did like the work of Charles Palahnuik.

"_You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be."_

A made his choice.

We found him at the apple trees. B was the first one to reach him, and I saw him staring up, up, up at the blue sky. There was no sound, and I remembered A climbing up to the very top of those trees, waving his hands over his head.

Look at me, look how high up I am. I'm invincible. Untouchable.

To a young me, it looked like A had fallen and couldn't reach the ground. But there was no sound, and as the small search group gathered around the tree, the wind blew through the leaves, stirring the dust at our feet.

The rope swung to and fro. It was very strong rope. They said it snapped his neck immediately. He probably felt no pain.

The death was kept a secret from the rest of the house for the time being. I watched as mostly everyone around laughed and joked. I watched as B stared at the floor beneath his feet, perhaps wishing it would collapse and send him falling, falling, just like A had.

We had apple crisp after dinner that night. But it didn't taste the same.


	3. B

B was brilliant without even trying. One of those natural geniuses. He could waltz right into a test and sit down and get 100% percent without having looked at the material twice. What he learned in class was enough. A prodigy.

B didn't want to be a detective. He didn't want to take the name. He was perfectly content being ordinary, being one of the ones who will pass through the house into ordinary society. But he was well liked anyway. He could talk to anyone and charm his way into anywhere. Sometimes he would stay up and tap conversations through the walls of the rooms in Morse Code, just so that he and his friends wouldn't have to pick up the conversation the next day. There was always a special closing he'd put at the end of a conversation, telling them he'd see them tomorrow.

But he was supposed to be the perfect copy. B stood for Back-up. What A worked so hard to be, B got with as little effort as possible.

I think he kind of hated the world for that. I think he hated himself for that.

B could see the world in a way no one else could. He said he could see the names of the others, the ones that we were never allowed to know. He said there were numbers too, always floating below the names. He never knew what they were for, just that they got smaller and smaller as time went on. I once asked what he saw above mine. He told me the name I never knew I had.

It wasn't until A died that B found out what the numbers were for. He blamed himself. He knew that A had a short time left. The day before A went to the trees he knew that A had one day left. B thought if he had known he would have stopped it.

B stood for blame. He always blamed himself.

He was born with the eyes of a…of a what, I'm not sure, but he had them before he was born. Beyond his birthday. So hence the name, BB. But he wasn't content with that, not content with the name he was given. So he sought a different name, an alias.

A man with the last name Ryuzaki visited Wammy's House, once. He must have been a friend of the founder of the institution. I never saw B smile like that when he saw the number above the man's head. I suppose it was very small, because the next week, there was an accident in which the man suffered and died. But B was indebted to the man, because he gave him the new name.

As I said, there were those that wanted the name of the greatest of us all, but there were others that wanted more. They not only wanted the name, they wanted to beat the name. They wanted to surpass the name, to step on it and put themselves as the best. B was never interested in it before, but after A's death, something changed.

B then stood for the best. The best, the brightest, the one who will succeed.

Or so he thought.

B studied in the library as well. This began to concern the adults as well, because they worried he might go the same way as A. So they put a time limit on the time spent in the library. The stupid, well meaning adults never did enough until it was too late.

B began to paint dark lines beneath his eyes and walked with a slight hunch, like he was carrying a heavy load on his shoulders. What was it? Vengeance for A? But if so, who was the bad guy in this equation? Who was he trying to imitate?

Funny, now when I read books about what became of the LA BB cases. B never really liked jam. Sure, he ate it on toast, but the extent that he took with the FBI lady, Naomi Misora was a great exaggeration. Perhaps it was just another imitation of the imaginary opponent. It also said he loved to eat sweet things. I wonder where B met this enemy that he wanted to overcome. Where he learned the habits.

In May, just after the anniversary of A's death, B left the house. There was never a maximum age to leave Wammy's House. You either did or you didn't. Those who stayed behind usually became a part of the staff, helping out the younger members of the house.

But those who left usually became a part of the system. The higher ups of Wammy's House kept tabs on all graduates, to see what they were up to, whether good or evil. But B left without telling anyone where he was going or what he was doing.

And I suppose that was enough to draw the attention of several people. And I suppose that was enough.

The B who snuck out to the apple trees with A and studied in the library, the B who could talk to anyone and anyone could talk to, B was gone. Vanished without a trace.

Rue Ryuzaki was the name he took on. R.R., a seemingly random choice. Perhaps there was some significance in taking the name of a dead man, but I guess if you look closer, you'd see the reasoning. Apparently in the Japanese language, R and L often get mixed up. So, but that way of thinking, R.R. could also be L.L.

The name no one ever dared to take. The name no one had ever achieved.

So that was B's opponent, and Los Angeles was the playing field. Word of the Wara Ningyo Murders, the Locked Room mystery traveled faster than one could think. By now the world knows of the FBI agent Naomi Misora, how she encountered B while investigating the murders independently. How she solved the crime just in time and how B was sentenced to life in a California prison.

B's story ended miles away from where it started.

B stood for brilliant, a brilliant mind. A brilliant mind obsessed with beating a person he had never seen, never met. But we all are a little, inside.

B stood for blind. He could see the names of the people around him. He could see how much time they had on Earth. But B's life was simply a utensil to him, used only to get what he wanted. Perhaps seeing the death of the world was a sad reminder that would never go away.

I suppose it was its own kind of message, like a tapping against a wall.

_"I'll see you on the other side."_


	4. C

Who broke the window? Who tracked mud throughout the house? Who stole the cookies from the jar in the kitchen where no one was allowed? Who scribbled marker on the walls, who left the tap in the bathroom on and flooded the entire third floor?

The answer to all these questions and more was always C.

No matter what happened, it was always C, whether she did it or not. She was our scapegoat, the smallest deer in the pack who would always be thrown to the wolves. It's not because she was small, not because she was ugly or mean or stupid. C was just…average. Like the grade you'd get on a mediocre paper.

You'd think in a house of geniuses we'd know better. How many scars you can inflict on a child when they're still trying to find a place in the world. We never meant any harm, of course. It just happened. She was chosen just for being there. She'd kind of hang around at the edges of our conversations, throwing in her two cents every now and then, but never being addressed personally. Most of the time all she'd do was smile and nod at whatever was being discussed and who was saying it.

Until trouble came, of course. Every accident, every dish broke or pencil stolen, the finger of blame was always pointed towards C. Always. She never fought back, never cried, "It wasn't me!" like the rest of us. She just sat there, nervously chewing on the end of the neat braid she put her dark hair in every day.

Perhaps she thought by taking the fall for other's mistakes she would be accepted. Wammy's House didn't have a hierarchy ruled by cliques and labels, of course. Most people got along well. But there was something about C that caused her to be overlooked, whether it was when saving seats during meals or choosing teams for cricket outside. Maybe she tried too hard, or maybe it was because she wasn't an orphan like the rest of us, maybe we felt a little bit of disdain for her because we thought she wouldn't be able to understand us.

C had parents. Parents that didn't want her, but parents nonetheless. They came here one day, dragging a six-year old girl by the hand and left her standing alone in the middle of the hall for some adult to find her, as if to say, _'Here, we have no use for her anymore.'_

There wasn't really any reasoning behind her apparent abandonment. If you listened to her long enough, she'd tell you her life was particularly normal, happy even before her parents up and left. Obviously they still knew they had a child. She got a check in the mail every month and a small card on her birthday. But she never saw them again.

Maybe she was used to that. Abandonment. Blame. Maybe she resigned herself to the fact that no one wanted her until there was the need for a sacrifice. And C was always the lamb sacrificed to the lions.

Who left the mess all over the floor of the classroom? C did.

Who was the one that left the back door open? C.

Why was the cat covered in an array of colored paint? I dunno, ask C.

Obviously the adults caught on. There was no way a girl of C's age and size could be capable of pranks and accident of that size and quantity. And C was such a quiet, kind girl. Not a troublemaker. So when fingers were pointed at her, there was usually no punishment at all. But it was the thought that hurt.

C used to walk down the halls at night in her nightgown. She was so quiet, you could barely hear the light tapping of her bare feet against the wooden floor. I never saw her on one of those night expeditions, but I can imagine moonlight streaming through the stained glass windows lighting the halls better than a lamp. And C would walk, as though in a trance through them, never knowing where she was going, never waking up because her footsteps never made a sound.

The tears that ran down her face never made a sound either.

If someone were to catch her wandering the halls at night, what would happen? If someone knew that there was someone sleepwalking in the middle of the night, who would tell? Who would take the blame? It would be impossible, because no one really knew.

No one but C herself.

C left the Wammy's House when she turned eighteen. People had stopped blaming her by then, but I think it still left a mark. Whenever there was trouble, she'd tense up and halfheartedly raise her hand to accept the consequences before hastily putting it down again. Her eyes would dart nervously around at the others, waiting for someone to say, "C did it!" She had stopped chewing on her braid. She had cut it off years ago.

I wonder what the new world looked like through C's eyes. The Wammy's House is our whole life during our childhood, our whole world. To C, it must have been a world of hurt and blame. Of misunderstanding. What did it feel like to walk through those doors and out into a world where no one knows your name? No one knows who you are?

More importantly, what was it like to have the burden of the world lifted off of your shoulders? What did that feel like?


	5. D

There's always a joker in every pack of cards. A black sheep in every flock. Someone that stands out from the everyday normal, whether good or bad. In a regular life, that person might be called popular. Be always surrounded by people admiring up close and from afar. Certainly a person like that would never be lonely.

In a world of geniuses, that person is called a troublemaker. And yet, it was almost the same.

Perhaps D knew he would never be the best, the brightest at anything. So to compensate, he devoted his time to shaking the very core of our little home sweet home. Of course he was the one who painted the swear words on the outside wall of the house, the one who drew mustaches all over the pictures in the encyclopedias in the library and the one who somehow managed to replace all of the light bulbs in the house with water balloons while everyone was sleeping.

Sometimes D _overcompensated_.

Of course, often times he was caught. Detention, sent to bed without supper, even threats of being kicked out were all collected throughout his time in the house. Roger couldn't really do anything to him until he was eighteen, however, save for sending D to the state penitentiary. Maybe that's what D was trying to do.

D always bragged that his father was a criminal sent to jail back when he was four years old, three years before his mother died of an unknown illness. He would tell anyone who'd listen how his old man killed someone with his bare hands and hid the body in the kitchen pantry. He gave the smaller children nightmares for two months with bloody recollections as if he had even been there.

Perhaps troublemaking, lawbreaking, perhaps the rebellious nature was simply in his blood.

Along with constant eye rolls and exasperated sighs and scolding, D gained a group of admirers. Because really, he wasn't a bad kid. No, he just liked to joke around. Humor that wasn't really meant to hurt anybody, really. Oftentimes if you were on the receiving end of one of his pranks, you'd find a piece of candy stuffed underneath your pillow the next night, like an unspoken apology. A thank you.

D was considered invincible to the other children. A real daredevil. He was treated like a war hero, someone who had been threatened with the worst and lived to tell the tale. He had his own group of admirers, a little fan club going. Sometimes they followed and assisted with his little jokes and pranks. It would be remarkable tacky to compare that little group to the massive amount of followers that the murderer Kira had many years later, but they had the same idea. Loyalty to be proven in actions. People need a leader to look to and a leader needs followers. That is the way the world works.

So D's mischief soon escalated to something bigger, a little gang of some sort. The pranks began to get worse and worse, dangerous and more dangerous. No one was ever hurt, but there were some close calls. I wonder if D knew what he was doing. Was he simply power-drunk, blind to the rest of the world?

The turning point was the visit. D was called for one day in the middle of class. It was a dissection, something that D would definitely taken advantage of given the right opportunity and time.

Roger had sent me to walk D to the office. When D sauntered outside and we walked through the halls towards the office, I was silent the entire time. The only sound was the empty footsteps echoing through the lonely corridors. Unusual, because D usually loved to talk.

Finally, D spoke. "It's probably my father. He's probably gonna pick me up today."

This significantly surprised me. How had that idea gotten into his head? It was amazing he even dared to speak of the place he came from. Our pasts and histories are strictly forbidden to each other. It does not matter what happened in the past. What matters is that we are here now.

But even that didn't satisfy D, and he continued to brag, "Yeah, I got a letter saying he's finally out. Turns out they reduced his sentence 'cause of good behavior. He said he's going to be taking me out of this place once he's free, and we can be normal again."

Was that what he wanted? To be 'normal'? Everyone always told us we were smart, wonderful, geniuses. We used that name with pride. To be a 'Wammy Kid' meant something. It meant we were special.

To D, it meant we were freaks.

The office door was closed. Voices whispered and murmured behind it, one familiar and one unfamiliar. D smirked like he knew who the second person was, and perhaps he did. He waved to me as he pulled open the heavy wooden door a crack and slipped inside.

I was supposed to return to class after that. The day was rather quiet and so was the night. No one went to sleep and found a dead, preserved frog under their pillow. There were no nightly marches through the house looking for trouble. Just peace.

D was back the next day, but he wasn't there. He just sat at the table staring at his breakfast. People walked by and tried talking to him, told him what he missed and asked what was up, but he didn't respond. Like the usual lively spark behind his blue eyes was gone.

What happened behind closed office doors left an impact on D, a mark that cut deep and scarred. D became quiet and diligent, respectful and modest. This came as a relief to the adults of the house, but to the rest of us, it was like the boy D had died, leaving this new stranger in his place.

D grew up. D left the Wammy's House. D disappeared into the folds of society and never came back. Perhaps he would rather leave behind the memories of this place, the 'freaks' he knew and try to be 'normal'.

I wonder exactly who that was that he met it in the office. It couldn't have been his father, would have been impossible.

His father wasn't even a murderer.


	6. E

**Dedicated to my best friend, Ryuu-chan (Shoshoryuu29), who has always wanted to fly.**

**Disclaimer (this is the first and last time I am ever doing this): I do not own Death Note.**

**Thank you to everyone who reviewed the last few chapters!**

**/**

E always seemed to have a fixation with the sky. Often she would walk outside and lie on the ground, staring up at the cloud-speckled sky. It was an odd habit that she practiced, in the rain or in the sun. Often she would stay out so long the adults would worry and send someone out to find her.

Eventually, they learned to just look out the window.

She told me when she was a child, it seemed that the birds used to mock her groundedness with their songs. Their chirping outside her window was their way of reminding her that they could soar, touching the ground only to fly up again.

The only time her feet met the air was to fall back down again.

She kept trying, though. Jumping, running, doing whatever she could to touch the clouds. It was like a game, to see how long she could remain in the air before falling, tripping and tumbling into the dirt. I don't think anyone hated the earth, the ground, as much as E.

She wondered what it would be like, exactly, to leave the ground and never return.

Of course, this looked very odd. It was inevitable that she would be laughed at. Mocked. Some unkind children often followed her to her daily game, flapping their wings and making horrible cawing noises like a crow.

If E wanted to be a bird, I don't think she'd be a crow. I think she'd be more like a blue bird – always full of color and life. But it was scary, almost, to see all that life slowly draining away in frustration and anger.

_Why-why-why-I-don't-get-it-what-exactly-am-I-doing-wrong? _

Some of the well-meaning adults would try to channel that dedication into other areas. They encouraged her to spend the time she spent trying to fly instead in the library, studying, or out in the football fields kicking the ball around. E was smart, but not exceptionally so. She knew her strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps this made her wiser than the average genius.

"Humans don't have wings. They can't fly."

"You wanna see the sky? Go buy a plane ticket."

Logical, reasonable, well-meaning advice that she never took. Even the adults of Wammy's House soon tired of trying to reason with her. Any worry from the beginning soon disappeared. Unless she got so reckless she jumped off the roof, it was nothing to worry about.

The advice soon turned to jokes and jeers.

"If humans were meant to fly, we'd have wings, idiot. That's why most people fall off of buildings."

But E had long since stopped listening.

/

No one believed her when she told them.

They all turned away when she wanted to tell them.

Eventually, she stopped trying to tell people, but she couldn't help but walk around with a grin on her face, her head high and her back straight, as if trying to look the world in the eye.

E kept it to herself, and often drew pictures in art class of a small girl with blonde hair and green eyes, her arms spread wide and surrounded by nothing but clouds. The teacher praised it the first time, but soon grew tired of it as that was all she drew from then on.

I've heard that E left the Wammy's House at eighteen to go to college in America. She was a smart girl who would have succeeded in anything she chose to do. I've heard that she became an engineer and got married and lives in a house with a white-picket fence in a typical small town. A regular orphan's dream, perhaps, but not a Wammy kid's.

And E was never a typical orphan, nor a regular Wammy kid.

Sometimes visitors to the house say that when they look out the window, they can see a young girl, about twelve years old, lying on her back in the yard, staring up at the clouds and listening to the birds. If they're lucky, maybe they'll see her running back and forth, jumping every now and then and counting the seconds until she hits the ground.

E told anyone who would listen the day that she counted to six before hitting the ground. It was all she could talk about for the entire week.

Of course, no one ever actually sees her leave the ground and drift off towards the sky. It was probably a lie, fabricated to make us leave her alone. But if she wanted us to leave her alone, then why did she keep on trying so hard to make us believe her?

(You know, they say sometimes when the ghost of the girl jumps, they can see her for just a fraction of second, floating, touching the sky, just for a second.

Some say it's a trick of the light.

Others, they know better.)


End file.
